Saturday, July 09, 2011

First, I got quoted by a Huffington Post writer about Kalachakra, a big feel-good "Buddhist" festival going on right now in Washington DC. Here's the article: http://tinyurl.com/3texsfo.

I just returned from spending four days at Starwood, a pagan festival held in the Wisteria campgrounds in Pomeroy, Ohio. They had wifi there, which surprised me. But I was there to present two workshops and also to gather some data of my own, so I didn't spend much time on the web.

This festival is held by a group called A.C.E., the Association for Consciousness Exploration. Near as I can tell from simply walking around, watching and listening (and not doing any in depth research at all), ACE appears to be a group of older hippie guys who did a lot of their exploration of consciousness back in the sixties and seventies through ingesting large amounts of psychedelic substances. Some seem to have moved on to other things. Some have given up the drugs as their main form of exploration and now just smoke a little weed to get mellow. Others are still pretty deeply committed to so-called "entheogens" as a means of accessing so-called "higher states of consciousness."

Anyone who has read my book Hardcore Zen or, indeed, spent much time reading this blog knows already that I am not a great champion of the use of drugs as a means of spiritual advancement. I don't feel bad about not being a convenient go-to guy for encouragement to pollute the body/mind with toxic substances in order to achieve great awakenings at a cheap price. There are already plenty of people out there who advocate that.

While I was at Starwood, I was getting mightily annoyed by all the people out there who were deluding themselves and others into believing that a cheap dose of acid, 'shrooms, peyote, "molly" or whatever was going to get them to a higher spiritual plane. So I logged on to facebook and I wrote:

Drug users annoy the fuck out of me. Losers.

This received 49 "like" votes and has so far gathered 96 comments, the most recent of which showed up just six hours ago even though the status update appeared around 36 hours ago (if my barely adequate math skills are correct). I have no reason to believe the comments have stopped completely yet.

This is how I felt at midnight after spending several hours around some really energetic, intelligent, creative and fun kids who were loading themselves to the gills on psychoactive substances. Many of these substances appear to have been provided by older folks in the community who believed they were helping these young folks explore the frontiers of human consciousness or some such thing. Again, this is just my "eyeball" observation and is not based on in-depth research into the source of the drugs they were using. It was certainly clear that some of the older folks were very much encouraging this behavior even if they were not directly contributing to it.

These young stoned kids were really nice people, by the way. They went out of their way to generously provide free food for anyone who showed up at their campsite. And their food was way better than the overpriced stuff down at the main cafe on site. So I ate a lot of it.

I found myself becoming extremely fond of these folks. They were definitely a lot more fun to hang around with than just about anyone else at Starwood. They seemed to be asking questions rather than trying to revisit their glory days or wallow in a sea of bad cliches and dull role-playing games.

And yet they were destroying the very things that made them like that by numbing themselves to the real world with dangerous drugs. Moreover the very people who should have known better and should have been guiding them away from that kind of behavior were, instead, encouraging it.

I am not a fan of drugs. Never will be. And that makes some people really mad. I'm guessing these people feel like if they could convert me to their way of thinking it would be a double delicious coup. Getting someone like me to say drugs were The Way would count way more than getting Terrance McKenna to say it for the 30,000th time. But it's not going to happen.

At the same time, I am a huge, huge fan of much of the drug-influenced art, music and writing of the sixties and seventies. While I was at that campsite I sat and read most of the book The Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (aka Baba Ram Dass, later of Be Here Now fame). It's a book about the authors' deeply mistaken reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a guide for the drug taking experience. It is also the inspiration for The Beatles marvelous song Tomorrow Never Knows.

It's a pretty cool book. I even went on-line and ordered a copy for myself. The fact that it's dead wrong doesn't make it any less cool. But, folks, that book is as old as I am. We're both copyrighted the same year! The brave new world Leary and Alpert envisioned would come about in the 21st century (aka now) when everybody tuned in, turned on and dropped out never happened.

Drugs did not make everybody become beautiful and loving and spiritual aware. Instead they led to death and crime and waste. Lots of my friends were bright young consciousness explorers when they were the age these kids I hung out with are now. Some cleaned up, some became waste cases, a few are dead.

It was one thing to believe in 1964 that a brave new tripped out age was about to dawn. It's quite another to still believe that now, having seen what the last 47 years have shown us about where that path leads.

If you want some examples, how about Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious, Syd Barrett, John Entwistle, Kurt Cobain... Do I really need to get so cliched with this? Come on now.

A number of people on my Facebook page took me to task for what they saw as a violation of "Right Speech." Listen. Right Speech isn't about being meek and mild and only telling people what they want to hear. Right Speech is saying what needs saying when it needs saying. Any speech that supports the use of drugs as a means to really get to know yourself is bullshit. Speech that softens the real hit some people need to get that message is useless.

You can comment all you want, but you won't change my mind about drugs. You will always and forever be wrong if you try to equate true spirituality with frying your brain on chemicals (even if they grow inside cacti and fungi). Put it this way, if you want me to say drugs are cool, you're gonna lose. And what would that make you?

249 comments:

Here is the current article by Sam Harris, kind of on the same topic.I think that he has a more ligitimate viewpoint than Brad's.Not all of these things "Fry your Brain" But they do temporarily change your state of conciousness.And this is something of interest, if you are interested in concoiusness.http://www.samharris.org/

I have felt the same way as you do, despite my own youthful experimentation w/hallucinogens. I think it's a lazy, potentially dangerous way to go. However, a podcast w/Dr. Roland Griffiths on The Secular Buddhist has me rethinking this... http://www.thesecularbuddhist.com/episode_069.php

but compare hendrix on guitar to debashish bhattacharya. hendrix looks like he's taking a crap. debashish has a light smile and is intensely focused on each action. hendrix eats his pleasure like an addict and hypnotizes his audience. debashish nibbles a bit to support his playing and creates space for awareness of sound.

the behavior of a drug addict such as hendrix is merely evidence of his state of mind. of what use is it, except to other drug addicts?

Sigh. Like you I have tried hallucinogens. Quit them long before you did. No way would I ever do them again. But John Lennon would not have been John Lennon without them. He would have been.. Barry Manilow.

As a long-time psychonaut myself, who in the last decade has -for no particular reasons- pared it down to a glass or two of wine evenings and an occasional Absinthe or Mohito come summertime... I would nevertheless be loath to advocate even the use of alcohol, a legal, and as such readily available hardcore drug IMO.

The people I work with at the homeless shelter represent several generations of substance abuse damage often exacerbating other mental health issues. I would not be exaggerating if I said that 90 per cent of these folks find themselves in homeless, jobless situations due to the ongoing presence of drug use in the family.

Had a wild hair to check in on HCZ today for the first time in a while, and wow! The whole Magid / Warner thing was fascinating. Going to comment here cause it’s the newest post. Forgive me.

First: I completely agree about the pretentiousness of sanghas and so many other things in New York. I sat with a few and while no one was ever rude to me, I never felt welcome. Even at one where I sat multiple times a week for a year. I introduced myself to people and tried to make friends and it never went anywhere. Back in Southwest Virginia, I felt like part of a family after sitting with the sangha here for one week.

I think there may be various factors at play in this, but I do believe at least part of it is the general vibe and attitude of New York, which made me so glad to leave. I would sum it up as, people don't know how to relax and enjoy life un-ironically. There's a whole added layer of analysis and self-regard, ambition to be seen and known, to achieve at any cost. But I can't say I don't understand the hard edge many New Yorkers have. New York is a tough place to live if you're not rich, even now, and I see a lot of the mannerisms of New Yorkers as a sort of survival mode. Living there certainly didn't bring out the best in me, though it made me stronger.

I agree with Harry 110%, that Barry's statement was a brazen violation of the ethical code of any therapist or analyst. An analysis is a deep penetration of a person's most vulnerable parts - the innuendo here is intentional - and to do so publicly and without any agreement is an act of violence, in my opinion.

Doesn't mean I think Barry Magid is evil. I've been guilty of using my own analyses of people as weapons before, which fills me with shame. But like Barry, Brad, and the rest of us, I am not perfect.

From the impression I have, I think Mr. Magid is more like Brad's persona than Brad is, which is that, as Mr. Magid has admitted himself, he's an angry person with a dark side, who's not afraid of confrontation and can be an asshole. Whereas I see Brad as a polite, naïve, and meek Midwestern boy, who's a bit puritanical in his view (this post is a great example).

Most therapists have an asshole side to them, I say this as someone in that profession, there is truly a violent under-current to what we do. Yes, we are hopefully compassionate, and agents of healing, but we get inside people whether they really want us to or are ready for us to or not, we pick people apart and reduce them.

I actually have great fondness for traditional psychoanalytical theory and practice. I find "evidence-based practice" to be a bit of hocus pocus; the reality is, with the thorny complex issues of the human mind, a lot of time there is no "success" in "healing the patient," whatever that is, and when there is "success," it's often more subtle. There's a reductionism to cognitive therapy, as useful as it can be; it treats symptoms, it's "functional" but soulless. Classic psychoanalysis is the poetry, the soul, a doorway of feeling that opens a space of compassion and connection with a client if you use it well.

I think it's good to examine our practice and be honest with ourselves when we're not carrying out our jobs effectively. To me, the heart of being a good therapist is being self-aware enough to know when YOUR shit, YOUR countertransference, is causing you to go off the rails. This takes a rigorous self-honesty that can be quite difficult to perfect, as we human beings are champions of self-deception! Even the best, most ethical therapists will fail at this sometimes.

I don't think either party involved in that incident is evil. I respect Brad as one of the most sincere and open teachers "on the circuit," and respect Barry as someone with brilliant ideas and his own form of intense openness. I think both could benefit from a little more self-awareness, as could we all.

back in the day, the only thing i got into was a little weed. if it were legal, i'd probably partake every now and then. I don't see anything wrong with it as entertainment, and you might get some cool insights now and then, but its definitely not doing the same thing as zen or other forms of meditation. i'd say drugs lowers your awareness and consciousness, which is still interesting, but meditation enhances your consciousness. Zen gets you in touch very intimately with reality--your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, etc.

drugs wont get you to some spiritual higher plane, if for no other reason than they are too pleasurable.

DeQuincy...and Coleridge. Cowboy druggies don't care for that high-brow sort of liter-rary product, Mumbles. They want to like party-hearty with the football team, or try to like bag the winner of wet tee-shirt contest at Sigma Krappa Epsilon...or roofie her, if need be. Nirvana dewd

Just what is "true spirituality?" I know that drugs provide fake spirituality as you do; however, no amount of contemplation or meditation is going to allow for any sort of spirituality if the mind/body dichotomy doesn't really exist. My path was something like this, "I used to be all hung up on drugs, then I was all hung up on the Lord, then I was all hung up on Soto Zen Buddhism, now I'd rather just unhang myself."

Come on Mums--no moralisms, por favor. Chasin' the Dragon on occasion need not mean....morphin' into a street junkie. For that matter, as one who has been around ..junkies and tweeker-hicks or psychedelic kreeps....viva junkies! Like musack too: the good ones are usually ...on H (Coltrane, Bill Evans, Hendrix, etc)

Hello! I appreciate your disdain for drugs. I have difficulty with you calling drug users losers. The drugs are shit and - pause - I reflected just now on what I had written (now erased) and I guess when you break it down - taking drugs = loser. Shit, I just hate calling people out like that. Damn you Brad Warner. It really is scary though, believing drugs are the answer and a quick fix. Nothing but sitting down, shutting up, and looking at yourself really and being accountable to NOW is okay. Everyday I seem to learn more about not the importance of words, but the importance of my assumptions those words mean when they come from someone else. Thanks!

While driving on a very long road trip, some people stop to enjoy the rides when they pass an amusement park. This doesn’t help expedite their journey in any way, but it can be fun as long as they don’t mistake the amusement park for their destination or the rollercoasters for their vehicle.

I've recently been reading some Robert Anton Wilson who I'd never heard of until someone posted a link here to the "Maybe Logic" documentary. He wrote some amazing stuff that certainly appears to have been enhanced by his use of marijuana, peyote, LSD, etc. He also used marijuana near the end of his life for leg pain resulting from post polio syndrome. I would not say that his usage was wrong in either situation. Drugs can be considered as chemical tools and like all tools are not inherently "wrong" or "bad". It depends on who uses them and how they are used.

As others have said, your view that drug users are annoying is not what I personally found objectionable about your post. I'm not a fan of drugs as a means of "enlightenment," or for recreational purposes. However, calling a huge, diverse group of people "losers" seems really judgemental to my way of seeing. People have all kinds of reasons for using drugs, and many of them are lost in a hellish cycle. Publicly condemning them as losers is probably not what they need. It just seemed like a rash, emotional generalization you had to a specific situation. But we're all guilty of that from time to time, so it's not like you should be held to some higher "zen" standard.

RA Wilson was a blow-hard libertarian-quack and occultist (not at all synonymous with authentic ..zen). He could tell a few dirty jokes ala Carlin--. Dope didn't help, but most likely made things worse. Next question.

When are you gonna "wake up" and admit that the so-called practice of zazen is as worthless as an ac-d induced fantasy?

The gurus, the holy men, and the conmen of enlightenment that we have in our midst today offers us permanent bliss. This promise has been passed onto us from generation to generation. Because we are brainwashed into believing in this centuries-old offer, we continue to believe in the experience of bliss, which our gurus and holy men claim to experience nonstop. I don’t know if what I am saying makes any sense to you. That’s why I keep telling people that this great spiritual heritage, which many Indians are so proud of, was born out of acid heads... - U.G. Krishnamurti

What's all this silly pairing of zen and 'spirituality'? Zen is practicality, or reality but not 'spirituality' Dig a ditch straight. A ditch gets dug. Dig a ditch high. A ditch gets dug. What goes on in your consciousness in either case is just a doddle. Drink booze, take pills, just mucks up the soup your brain sits in. It doesn't mean anything.

The real trouble is when someone thinks that little mind show is real, and goes harming others, or themselves, based on it.

Schopenhauer, cowboy stoner. Not yr beatnik phonies. The Subluxanator never read or understood beats anyway (excepting maybe a few sections of Naked Lunch which he and ...his dallass nova boy had fun with).

You don't know f**k about Joyce, either, Byro the Subluxanator, blanca basura de mormono-babilon--couldn't tell Bloom from yr bong. Yr not a writer, stalker. Your jokes are not funny whatsoever hick. You even flunked yr LVN. But you do know...Subluxation! Explain it to us, mierda

Cosmic Trigger was originally published by And/Or Press about ten years ago, and by Pocket Books shortly thereafter. Although some of my novels have sold far better, in two dimensions at least it is my most "successful" book in human terms.

1. From the date of the first printing to the present, I have received more mail about Cosmic Trigger than about anything else I ever wrote, and most of this mail has been unusually intelligent and open-minded. For some reason, many readers of this book think they can write to me intimately and without fear, about subjects officially Taboo in our society. I have learned a great deal from the correspondence, and have met some wonderful new friends.

2. On lecture tours, I am always asked more questions about this book than about all my other works together.

This new edition presents an opportunity to answer the most frequent questions and to correct the most persistent misunderstandings.

It should be obvious to all intelligent readers (but curiously is not obvious to many) that my viewpoint in this book is one of agnosticism. The word "agnostic" appears explicitly in the prologue and the agnostic attitude is revealed again and again in the text, but many people still think I "believe" some of the metaphors and models employed here. I therefore want to make it even clearer than ever before that

I DO NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING

This remark was made, in these very words, by John Gribbin, physics editor of New Scientist magazine, in a BBC-TV debate with Malcolm Muggeridge, and it provoked incredulity on the part of most viewers. It seems to be a hangover of the medieval Catholic era that causes most people, even the educated, to think that everybody must "believe" something or other, that if one is not a theist, one must be a dogmatic atheist, and if one does not think Capitalism is perfect, one must believe fervently in Socialism, and if one does not have blind faith in X, one must alternatively have blind faith in not-X or the reverse of X.

My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended.

My attitude is identical to that of Dr. Gribbin and the majority of physicists today, and is known in physics as "the Copenhagen Interpretation," because it was formulated in Copenhagen by Dr. Niels Bohr and his co-workers c. 1926-28. The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called "model agnosticism" and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, "The map is not the territory." Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as "The menu is not the meal."

Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, "My current model" - or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel - "contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised." In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.

Cosmic Trigger deals with a process of deliberately induced brain change through which I put myself in the years 1962-1976. This process is called "initiation" or "vision quest" in many traditional societies and can loosely be considered some dangerous variety of self-psychotherapy in modern terminology. I do not recommend it for everybody, and I think I obtained more good results than bad ones chiefly because I had been through two varieties of ordinary psychotherapy before I started my own adventures and because I had a good background in scientific philosophy and was not inclined to "believe" any astounding Revelations too literally.

Briefly, the main thing I learned in my experiments is that "reality" is always plural and mutable.

Since most of Cosmic Trigger is devoted to explaining and illustrating this, and since I still encounter people who have read all my writings on this subject and still do not understand what I am getting at, I will try again in this new Preface to explain it ONE MORE TIME, perhaps more clearly than before.

"Reality" is a word in the English language which happens to be (a) a noun and (b) singular. Thinking in the English language (and in cognate Indo-European languages) therefore subliminally programs us to conceptualize "reality" as one block-like entity, sort of like a huge New York skyscraper, in which every part is just another "room" within the same building. This linguistic program is so pervasive that most people cannot "think" outside it at all, and when one tries to offer a different perspective they imagine one is talking gibberish.

The notion that "reality" is a noun, a solid thing like a brick or a baseball bat, derives from the evolutionary fact that our nervous systems normally organize the dance of energy into such block-like "things," probably as instant bio-survival cues. Such "things," however, dissolve back into energy dances -- processes or verbs -- when the nervous system is synergized with certain drugs or transmuted by yogic or shamanic exercises or aided by scientific instruments. In both mysticism and physics, there is general agreement that "things" are constructed by our nervous systems and that "realities" (plural) are better described as systems or bundles of energy functions.

So much for "reality" as a noun. The notion that "reality" is singular, like a hermetically sealed jar, does not jibe with current scientific findings which, in this century, suggest that "reality" may better be considered as flowing and meandering, like a river, or interacting, like a dance or evolving, like life itself.

Most philosophers have known, at least since around 500 B.C., that the world perceived by our senses is not "the real world" but a construct we create - our own private work of art. Modern science began with Galileo's demonstration that color is not "in" objects but "in" the interaction of our senses with objects. Despite this philosophic and scientific knowledge of neurological relativity, which has been more clearly demonstrated with each major advance in instrumentation, we still, due to language, think that behind the flowing, meandering, inter-acting, evolving universe created by perception is one solid monolithic "reality" hard and crisply outlined as an iron bar.

Quantum physics has undermined that Platonic iron-bar "reality" by showing that it makes more sense scientifically to talk only of the inter-actions we actually experience (our operations in the laboratory) ; and perception psychology has undermined the Platonic "reality" by showing that assuming it exists leads to hopeless contradictions in explaining how we actually perceive that a hippopotamus is not a symphony orchestra.

The only "realities" (plural) that we actually experience and can talk meaningfully about are perceived realities, experienced realities, existential realities -- realities involving ourselves as editors -- and they are all relative to the observer, fluctuating, evolving, capable of being magnified and enriched, moving from low resolution to hi-fi, and do not fit together like the pieces of a jig-saw into one single Reality with a capital R. Rather, they cast illumination upon one another by contrast, like the paintings in a large museum, or the different symphonic styles of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Mahler.

Alan Watts may have said it best of all: "The universe is a giant Rorschach ink-blot." Science finds one meaning in it in the 18th Century, another in the 19th, a third in the 20th; each artist finds unique meanings on other levels of abstraction; and each man and woman finds different meanings at different hours of the day, depending on the internal and external environments.

This book deals with what I have called induced brain change, which Dr. John Lilly more resoundingly calls "metaprogramming the human bio-computer." In simple Basic English, as a psychologist and novelist, I set out to find how much rapid re-organization was possible in the brain functioning of one normal domesticated primate of average intelligence -- the only one on whom I could ethically perform such risky research - myself.

Like most people who have historically attempted such "metaprogramming," I soon found myself in metaphysical hot water. It became urgently obvious that my previous models and metaphors would not and could not account for what I was experiencing. I therefore had to create new models and metaphors as I went along. Since I was dealing with matters outside consensus reality-tunnels, some of my metaphors are rather extraordinary. That does not bother me, since I am at least as much an artist as a psychologist, but it does bother me when people take these metaphors too literally.

I beg you, gentle reader, to memorize the quote from Aleister Crowley at the beginning of Part One and repeat it to yourself if at any point you start thinking that I am bringing you the latest theological revelations from Cosmic Central.

What my experiments demonstrate - what all such experiments throughout history have demonstrated - is simply that our models of "reality" are very small and tidy, the universe of experience is huge and untidy, and no model can ever include all the huge untidiness perceived by uncensored consciousness.

I think, or hope, that my data also demonstrates that neurological model agnosticism - the application of the Copenhagen Interpretation beyond physics to consciousness itself - allows one to escape from certain limits of mechanical emotion and robot mentation that are inescapable as longa s one remains within one dogmatic model or one imprinted reality tunnel.

Personally I also suspect, or guess, or intuit, that the more unconventional of my models here - the ones involving Higher Intelligence, such as the Cabalistic Holy Guardian Angel or the extraterrestrial from Sirius - are necessary working tools at certain stages of the metaprogramming process.

That is, whether such entities exist anywhere outside our own imaginations, some areas of brain functioning cannot be accessed without using these "keys" to open the locks. I do not insist on this; it is just my own opinion. Some people seem to get through this area of Chapel Perilous without such personalized "Guides." I know of one chap who did it by imagining a super-computer in the future that was sending information backwards in time to his brain. More clever people may find even less "metaphysical" metaphors.

Ten years after the point at which this book ends, I do not care much about such speculations. Our lonely little selves can be "illuminated" or flooded with radical science-fiction style information and cosmic perspectives, and the source of this may be those extraterrestrials who seemed to be helping me at times, or the Secret Chiefs of Sufism, or the parapsychologists and/or computers of the 23rd Century beaming data backward in time, or it may just be the previously unactivated parts of our own brains. Despite the current reign of our New Inquisition, which attempts to halt research in this area, we will learn more about that as time passes. Meanwhile, agnosticism is both honest and becomingly modest....

In this connection, I am often asked about two books by other authors which are strangely resonant with Cosmic Trigger - namely VALIS by Philip K. Dick and The Sirian Experiment by Doris Lessing. VALIS is a novel which broadly hints that it is more than a novel - that it is an actual account of Phil Dick's own experience with some form of "Higher Intelligence." In fact, VALIS is only slightly fictionalized; the actual events on which it is based are recounted in a long interview Phil gave shortly before his death (see Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament, by Gregg Rickman.) The parallels with my own experience are numerous - but so are the differences. If the same source was beaming ideas to both Phil and me, the messages got our individual flavors mixed into them as we decoded the signals.

I met Phil Dick on two or three occasions and corresponded with him a bit. My impression was that he was worried that his experience was a temporary insanity and was trying to figure out if I was nutty, too. I'm not sure if he ever decided.

I interviewed Doris Lessing a few years ago for New Age magazine. She takes synchronicities very seriously, but was as agnostic as I am about the possibility that some of them are orchestrated by Sirians.

I heartily recommend all three volumes - VALIS, The Last Testament and The Sirian Experiments - to readers of this book. Unless you are locked into a very dogmatic reality-tunnel, you will have a few weird moments of wondering if Sirians are experimenting on us, and a few weird moments can be a liberating experience for those who aren't scared to death by them.

What is more important than such extra-mundane speculation, I think, are practical and pragmatic questions about what one does with the results of brain change experience. It is quite easy, I have discovered by meeting many New Age people, to use the techniques in this book and go stone crazy with them. Paranoid and schizophrenic cases are quite common among those who experiment in this area. Less clinical, but socially even more nefarious, are the leagues of self-proclaimed gurus and their equally deluded disciples, who have discovered, as I did, that there are many realities (plural), but have picked out one favorite non-Occidental reality-tunnel, named it Ultimate Reality or True Reality, and established new fanaticisms, snobberies, dogmas and cults around these delusions.

There is a great deal of lyrical Utopianism in this book. I do not apologize for that, and do not regret it. The decade that has passed since the first edition has not altered my basic commitment to the game-rule that holds that an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.

Since we all create our habitual reality-tunnels, either consciously and intelligently or unconsciously and mechanically, I prefer to create for each hour the happiest, funniest, and most romantic reality-tunnel consistent with the signals my brain apprehends. I feel sorry for people who persistently organize experience into sad, dreary and hopeless reality tunnels, and try to show them how to break the bad habit, but I don't feel any masochistic duty to share their misery.

This book does not claim that you "create your own reality" in the sense of total (but mysteriously unconscious) psychokinesis. If a car hits you and puts you in the hospital, I do not believe this is because you "really wanted" to be hit by a car, or that you "needed" to be hit by a car, as two popular New Age bromides have it. The theory of transactional psychology, which is the source of my favorite models and metaphors, merely says that, once you have been hit by a car, the meaning of the experience depends entirely on you and the results depend partly on you (and partly on your doctors). If it is medically possible for you to live -- and sometimes even if the doctors think it is medically impossible - you ultimately decide whether to get out of the hospital in a hurry or to lie around suffering and complaining.

Most of the time, this kind of "decision" is unconscious and mechanical, but with the techniques described in this book, such decisions can become conscious and intelligent.

The last part of this book deals with the worst tragedy of my life. I want to say, without self-pity (a vice I despise) that my years on this planet have included many other terrible and punishing experiences, starting with two bouts of polio when I was a child and including dozens of other things I don't want to complain about in public. When I write of creating a better and more optimistic reality-tunnel, of transcending ego-games, and of similar matters, it is not because I have lived in an ivory tower. It is because I have learned a few practical techniques for dealing with the brutal conditions on this primitive planet.

People at my lectures and seminars usually ask me if I am still optimistic about civilian space programs and life extension. I am more optimistic than ever. Despite the seemingly terminal case of rigidicus bureaucraticus at NASA, I have reason to believe certain European countries will soon jointly launch the kind of space migration effort advocated here; and Reagan's SDI, for all its jingoism, means that more money will be spent on basic research than at any previous time in history.

On the life extension front, there have been several best-sellers on the subject since this book first appeared; there is interest even in the most intellectually backward part of U.S. society (namely, the Congress); and scientists in the longevity field whom I have met recently all cheerfully say they are getting more money for research than in the 70s. The breakthrough cannot be far away.

Finally as a matter of some entertainment value, not all the mail I have received about this book has been intelligent and thoughtful. I have received several quite nutty and unintentionally funny poison-pen letters from two groups of dogmatists - Fundamentalist Christians and Fundamentalist Materialists.

The Fundamentalist Christians have told me that I am a slave of Satan and should have the demons expelled with an exorcism. The Fundamentalist Materialists inform me that I am a liar, a charlatan, fraud and scoundrel. Aside from this minor difference, the letters are astoundingly similar. Both groups share in the same crusading zeal and the same total lack of humor, charity, and common human decency.

These intolerable cults have served to confirm me in my agnosticism by presenting further evidence to support my contention that when dogmas enter the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

The last part of this book deals with the worst tragedy of my life. I want to say, without self-pity (a vice I despise) that my years on this planet have included many other terrible and punishing experiences, starting with two bouts of polio when I was a child and including dozens of other things I don't want to complain about in public. When I write of creating a better and more optimistic reality-tunnel, of transcending ego-games, and of similar matters, it is not because I have lived in an ivory tower. It is because I have learned a few practical techniques for dealing with the brutal conditions on this primitive planet.

People at my lectures and seminars usually ask me if I am still optimistic about civilian space programs and life extension. I am more optimistic than ever. Despite the seemingly terminal case of rigidicus bureaucraticus at NASA, I have reason to believe certain European countries will soon jointly launch the kind of space migration effort advocated here; and Reagan's SDI, for all its jingoism, means that more money will be spent on basic research than at any previous time in history.

On the life extension front, there have been several best-sellers on the subject since this book first appeared; there is interest even in the most intellectually backward part of U.S. society (namely, the Congress); and scientists in the longevity field whom I have met recently all cheerfully say they are getting more money for research than in the 70s. The breakthrough cannot be far away.

Finally as a matter of some entertainment value, not all the mail I have received about this book has been intelligent and thoughtful. I have received several quite nutty and unintentionally funny poison-pen letters from two groups of dogmatists - Fundamentalist Christians and Fundamentalist Materialists.

The Fundamentalist Christians have told me that I am a slave of Satan and should have the demons expelled with an exorcism. The Fundamentalist Materialists inform me that I am a liar, a charlatan, fraud and scoundrel. Aside from this minor difference, the letters are astoundingly similar. Both groups share in the same crusading zeal and the same total lack of humor, charity, and common human decency.

These intolerable cults have served to confirm me in my agnosticism by presenting further evidence to support my contention that when dogmas enter the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

The last part of this book deals with the worst tragedy of my life. I want to say, without self-pity (a vice I despise) that my years on this planet have included many other terrible and punishing experiences, starting with two bouts of polio when I was a child and including dozens of other things I don't want to complain about in public. When I write of creating a better and more optimistic reality-tunnel, of transcending ego-games, and of similar matters, it is not because I have lived in an ivory tower. It is because I have learned a few practical techniques for dealing with the brutal conditions on this primitive planet.

People at my lectures and seminars usually ask me if I am still optimistic about civilian space programs and life extension. I am more optimistic than ever. Despite the seemingly terminal case of rigidicus bureaucraticus at NASA, I have reason to believe certain European countries will soon jointly launch the kind of space migration effort advocated here; and Reagan's SDI, for all its jingoism, means that more money will be spent on basic research than at any previous time in history.

On the life extension front, there have been several best-sellers on the subject since this book first appeared; there is interest even in the most intellectually backward part of U.S. society (namely, the Congress); and scientists in the longevity field whom I have met recently all cheerfully say they are getting more money for research than in the 70s. The breakthrough cannot be far away.

Finally as a matter of some entertainment value, not all the mail I have received about this book has been intelligent and thoughtful. I have received several quite nutty and unintentionally funny poison-pen letters from two groups of dogmatists - Fundamentalist Christians and Fundamentalist Materialists.

The Fundamentalist Christians have told me that I am a slave of Satan and should have the demons expelled with an exorcism. The Fundamentalist Materialists inform me that I am a liar, a charlatan, fraud and scoundrel. Aside from this minor difference, the letters are astoundingly similar. Both groups share in the same crusading zeal and the same total lack of humor, charity, and common human decency.

These intolerable cults have served to confirm me in my agnosticism by presenting further evidence to support my contention that when dogmas enter the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

Drugs did not make everybody become beautiful and loving and spiritual aware. Instead they led to death and crime and waste. Lots of my friends were bright young consciousness explorers when they were the age these kids I hung out with are now. Some cleaned up, some became waste cases, a few are dead.

I used to smoke a lot of pot. It sometimes would show me insights into my life that didn't occur to me when I was straight - or so I thought. But after a while I realized that I was smoking pot so that I could pretend my life was something that it was not. It was a lie I was telling myself every time I smoked the stuff. I think most drug use involves a similar lie. Everyone's lie is probably different but it amounts to the same thing - wanting to pretend your life is somehow cooler than it is because you don't want to face the truth. I finally decided that reality, even if it sucked, was better than any lie I wanted to keep telling myself.

While many Buddhists interviewed said they were excited about Kalachakra and believed it will bring a more peaceful climate, some have reservations.

"It's no more going to establish world peace than Live Aid or one of those things, or any average rock concert. I'm all for freeing Tibet. But there's nothing particularly Buddhist about that," said Brad Warner, an Ohio-based Soto Zen priest and author.

"People who go will pat themselves on the back for being Buddhists by virtue of attending some big commercial feel-good gathering. That's not Buddhism," he added.

"A Jedi's strength flows from the Force. But beware the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression. The dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan's apprentice."

No no, stupid fuck. As with say platonism, the terms of early buddhism are from a complex code (and ancient pre-judaic language --sanskrit) quite beyond yr techie-newage McQuackeries, and quasi-counseling.You need to listen. Actually, you need to be arrested

You never quite got even Korzybskis errors....what you perceive, and try to write about it...is not what ..Guru Brad sees. or the Yeti. or best palsie BongRon the Mormon, or Slaboj Zizek, your neighbor, or the human race. You could be quite ...delusional, and not even realize it. And indeed that's the case. So, say "seems", to you--- not "is". Yr dharma lesson, trash.

( not unrelated to the problem of other minds, but thats a bit too deep for you)

Drugs "work" by fucking up your neurotransmitters. Regardless of the pretty colors or even if you had genuine insight while poisoning yourself (and there is no other more accurate descriptor no matter how much you like it), you are poisoning yourself to do so.

It's hardly a choice of, say, chemo-therapy or radiation-therapy to alter your state. It's poison for it's own sake, to "see what happens."

Ah it's the hick trolls again. More like this, Anny McPreta: you detest all eastern religions (ie, your comment, or that of yr buttboy's above to quit using the sanskrit terms) and are really another hick christian--tho even xtians/LDS these days are into occult/kabbalah BS, ala RA Wilson, quack libertarian (then you don't understand his schtick, either). The usual white trash derailment

Does anyone think mysterion isn't still blogging full time here.. What does it mean for him to announce he's taking two months off from Brad's blog but then to continue on anyway as anonymous or whoever.. Why even bother keeping up this charade? No one cares one way or the other. He's a weird dude.

Ram Dass, aka Richard Alpert in his later books is not nearly so positive about drugs. In one of them he relates a story of giving LSD to his guru. The drug had no effect on the guru. Meditation is pretty powerful stuff all by itself.

Interesting how blog topics this weekend are hitting on drugs (a few I follow). Now that's higher consciousness and how everyone is interconnected, seems to me. Or is it Just Say No week, or something?

I've never understood how drugs can have anything to do with spirituality or higher consciousness or anything other than what it is: a drug. I say that with due respect to whatever groups there are in the world who have chewed peyote or whatever for centuries and centuries in tribal ceremonies or whatever. But other than that (which I don't know much about so I can't make any opinion) I don't see the point.

As a teenager in the late 70s, I did plenty of the above mentioned, including what passed for LSD--or so I was told. Supposedly you can't (or we couldn't) get "the real thing" anymore or it just wasn't pure anymore. But anyway, the experience was kind of like meditating and watching the thoughts flit by and all that except they were all distorted and dumb stuff was hysterically funny. I didn't really like it. I didn't want to be anyone except me and my own own brain. It was a waste of time. Senseless. Plus, as noted in the post, people involved in drugs aren't exactly doing their bodies or minds a favor. Some people I knew back then are dead (suicides and some ODs), completely brain fried as in brain damaged (especially a few who seemed proud and admired as the biggest acid heads around--they were kind of like "nobody in there" even back then), or they've been in and out of jail.

Some friends thought mushrooms were the next best thing to sliced bread and I was like no, thanks. I like my own head very much, thank you. Never touched them, though I'm kind of a fearless explorer in many other areas. But that, nah. I can get on a plane if I want to take a trip.

That stage of mine was brief but I learned from it--and glad I did--that I can go pretty much wherever I want to without any pharmaceutical help, even just on a cushion.

I don't see the point in taking hallucinogenic drugs at all. It's not real. And lots of creative people (e.g. Stephen King and a few others; I forget at the moment) thought they couldn't create without their drugs. They found out they could when they quit, and it was so much better.

An anonymous wrote, re recreational drugging: "It's poison for it's own sake, to "see what happens."

Yes, you can say that. But you only live once ;)

I don't mind that some people have never felt the need to "see what happens", or that they believe those that have are losers. The fact remains that some of us have responded enthusiastically to the invitation "Hey! Wanna see what happens?"

I have nothing but fond memories of my early pot-smoking years. I have mixed feelings about my subsequent 25+ year heroin addiction.

I haven't taken heroin for 6 years and advise others not to try it. I've smoked pot three times in the last 30 years and thoroughly enjoyed it. I've never been a regular drinker but I enjoy occasionally getting drunk, too. What you do is your business.

***********************Hi Leah,

I agree that doing drugs has nothing much to do with doing zazen. Being stoned is not at all the same as quiet sitting. But to exclude some experiences - or methods of inducing them - from inclusion in the notion "real" assumes a peculiarly restrictive definition of reality. (I'm only commenting on notions and definitions, not advocating things to do).

The story of Ch'an Master Teshan; through Ch'an (Zen) the Chinese make Buddhism their own - a similar challenge faces us in the West today; the practice of 'What is this?' is the practice of the First Noble Truth: dukkha; how Zen fits into the context of the Four Truths; the Four Truths and the Four Great Vows; the self who practices the path is neither existent nor non-existent; Layman P'ang: chopping wood and carrying water.

http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/169/?page=1

Japanese Zen master Sesso warned, “There is little to choose between a man lying in the ditch heavily drunk on rice liquor, and a man heavily drunk on his own ‘enlightenment’!”

Hey gniz, not sure what's happened here, I was away after 11:45 AM two days ago, but prior to that as you can see from the thread was having what seemed to be a rational back and forth (well, as rational as I get).

gniz said: "Who are all these people that seem to know each other? I cant follow it for the life of me...Harry, someone, Mumbles, 108, help me make sense of this madness!"

What it is, is mysterion having one of his 50 coffee days with nothing to do. Most of the above comments are him in a lightly disguised form but the same obsessions as always. Maybe you shouldn't have challenged him gniz. Commenting here as mysterion wasn't just a hobby for the old boy. Now he's completely run amuk.

You certainly need not advocate them as essential but you also need not shun them as absolutely worthless. We don't know the whole story on drugs, psychedelics, or hallucinogens just like we don't know what's giving us cancer--we can see some links but not the whole web of causation.

Some of my friends have done drugs and stopped, some have continued--some worse for the wear and others who seem to tolerate it fine.

It works for some and not for others.

Let's just keep an open mind about it. Your experience is absolutely correct.

I don't mind that some people have never felt the need to "see what happens", or that they believe those that have are losers. The fact remains that some of us have responded enthusiastically to the invitation "Hey! Wanna see what happens?"

Hi,

I find an interesting dissonance in the word "losers" catalysing some goodly tripances.

On a demotic level its a splash of cold water. But it also encourages a sip from what - what are you losing?

I think it might be useful to frame it in terms of stealing.

It seems to me that "Hey! Wanna see what happens" is like a petty thief. But we can also talk about the hardcore thief "I wanna get to the bottom of this - hit me!"

In my own experience as a half-wit undergrad I happened to play both roles with myself. The petty thief in me was the kid free, for the first time, of parental limitations, a grant to piss away, and lectures to snooze through. The hardcore thief got head-fucks reading philosophy, instead of revising for the paper on Social Problems and Political Solutions in 19th Century Novel.

The petty thief kept dipping into the sanity hoard for my own 3D surround-sound Lothlorien-cum-student-bedsit experience, and got slack and lazy. But for the hardcore thief, this was just women with beards, trickster palm-readers, and the snakeman. After a few rides at the carnival it was time for the witch-doctor to cast his runes and go hunting for the source.

Surfacing I realised that the petty thief was a stupid kid, screwing around with the facts of a fresh spring morning and the whole day laid out with something he wanted to do; that the hardcore thief wanted to play Russian roulette for his big silly little idea.

Going insane to the point where it all bottoms out recommends the finely tuned organ to leave insanity to its common-a-day whats and hows. There's nothing like the revelation of your profound stupidity, which includes that it ain't so profound, can be found anywhere and at any time without frazzling your finding mechanisms, and sends folk with tears in their eyes to the corner of their own room.

In other words there's better ways to be a loser, a thief - one's that don't involve losing or confusing the plotter.

It seems to me that the petty thiefs in us often end up spinning and being spun by the skewed romantic myths our inner lost child latched onto; and for so long, even if the wheel don't come off, which it can and does, it becomes hard even to recognise where its out of kilter, or why life has ground down to kinds of misery - fulminating listlessness, nihilistic cantankerousness and the like.

I think I understand what your getting at with "What you do is your business",#, but I don't believe it really ever works out that way. It's probably a good working rule of thumb until the all the rest can safely bleed into the heart and mind and find modes to act intimately through and with.

During my non-revision for Social Problems and Political Solutions, a friend close to my heart, and a fine thief, came to my room, said hi, and sat on the bed (keeps on sitting on the bed) apparently just bored. Just Bored! Perhaps a bad title for something that might just fill itself out beyond the pages of a C19th Novel.

"In The End of Faith, I argue that competing religious doctrines have divided our world into separate moral communities and that these divisions have become a continuous source of human violence. My purpose in writing the book was to offer a way of thinking about our world that would render certain forms of conflict, quite literally, unthinkable."

"In one section of the book (pp. 192-199), I briefly discuss the ethics of torture and collateral damage in times of war, arguing that collateral damage is worse than torture across the board. Rather than appreciate just how bad I think collateral damage is in ethical terms, some readers have mistakenly concluded that I take a cavalier attitude toward the practice of torture. I do not."

I hope you didn't read what I'd written as intended to be personal to you. My ramblings upon "What you do is your business", were intended to convey a sense that, although we have a life to explore in our own way, we're always recycling our lives into and out of others; that there are so many little thefts and pollutions that I increasing find as my/our collective business. From this perspective, I find the very responsible attitude of "what you do is your business" might also foreclose or blind-side me to what my doing can do business with.

Not so much a 'straightening out', as an increasing openness to the asymmetries my business goes by, along with all the little griefs these actions cleave.

I have a bad habit of addressing someone or picking out something they've written as a point of departure, which runs the risk of suggesting a lot of what I ruminate on is in some way intended to refer personally to them. A straightening up, perhaps.

I thought I'd take care whatever the situation, to let you know that I wasn't tending my laxing wyricals as personal medicine.

I hope you didn't read what I'd written as intended to be personal to you.

Not at all, ST. The "straightening out" thing was an attempt to acknowledge my usual motive for wanting to respond to what others write.

Certainly what I do is never solely my business, not in the sense that I ever act in isolation or that others are not impacted by my business. But my business and the impact it makes is still just my business. In a sense.

All statements are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.

As a younger person, I was misled by interpretations of Carlos Casteneda books into thinking that mushrooms and weed weren't "real drugs". Well, they are. I was scarred by a few experiences for awhile, and spirituality can't be about tripping your head off so hard that you pee your pants and pass out in a hallway speaking to phantoms. So, thanks Brad for propagating healthful ways of living.

At age 84, Alexander Shulgin and hiswife Ann, when asked what they couldconclude from their lifetime of explorationswith various phenethylamines andtryptamines, they answered,"42 is as good an answer as any."

I could not agree with you more about drugs. Those not willing to do the work to sit and find out who they truly are but instead use drugs to pollute themselves and call it a spiritual experience, are seeking something other than themselves.

Gudo Nishijima, in relation to the essence of how we hold/understand the Bodhisattva Precepts:

"No rule is our rule".

Of course, if 'morality' is something exterior or abstract or otherwise remote, then that may well just be adopted as the sort of carte blanche for reasoning and conduct that really doesn't do anyone any good at all.

It may be the difference (albeit just a polarised, provisional difference for the purposes of conversation) between 'no rule is our rule' as an invitation to indulge our various pathologies in new ways and 'no rule is our rule' as a recognition of, and observance of, our terrible responsibility as creators.

It may well be (and I think it is) that people take drugs/ booze for the exact same reason that Brad sits zazen. It may be their expression of bodhicitta. It may even be (dare I use the term?) 'skillful' at times for all Brad knows.

It's certainly often very 'unskillful' as I can attest.

I wonder if Brad can comment on other more interesting aspect of the Precept, such as how we might 'intoxicate' ourselves (and others) with our own viewpoints and opinions. Shooting from the hip(flask) sometimes lacks the cool cordial of reflection on this here shootist methinks.

Hi, I met Brad @ one of his workshops during Starwood. I have to agree with him on the use of drugs. I tried "the easy way" for 20 years or so. The only thing I got out of that was an empty bank account and lots of time recovering from the hangover from my so called enlightening experiences. I have just returned from my 12th Starwood experience. I will say this about Starwood: If you are into it someone else there will be too. The only other place I've had this experience is @ a Grateful Dead concert. The folks are genuine and non-judgmental. That said, Brad's workshops were a breath of fresh air for me. Thank you!

2. Another parents tells his teen: "Be safe tonight. And be home by a reasonable hour."

#1 offers a steadfast rule that is external to circumstance.

#2 offers a principle that is of circumstance.

Of course, this circumstance of #2 includes things that seem to exceed the now per se — previous experience, cultural norms, household norms, etc. But these are part of the circumstance, constitutive of the now.

It demands a complex negotiation of a breadth of factors. And it is by no means necessarily "more free." In fact, there are all sorts of insidious forces at work.

the wicca-hicks would much prefer the eazy way to McSatori ala the beastly A.C., dope, or Spam Harris. That has little or nothing to do with the 8-fold Path, which does imply certain...moral precepts (or...trad. rinzai)--

(A.C., "a man of unspeakable character" (said Yeats), was a Cambridge boy, knew latin and french, probably a bit of sanskrit, wrote poetry, and pushed a mean game of pawns. The wicca-hicks aren't exactly translating Baudelaire or playing grandmaster level chess are they--mo' like working on their McManson phantasies)